cabMood
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As the Baudelairean flaneur, I inhabited the city as a passive observer, a kind of voyeur, albeit attentive. Baudelaire linked the flaneur to the “man of the crowd,” but Poe’s Flaneur character did nothing but observe “the man of the crowd.” Through unnoticeable, almost invisible actions, such as recording myself walking, I surveyed, observed, and scrutinized the crowd and the urban landscape as an insider and outsider. Like a Flaneur, I navigated and experienced incidental and intentional psychological effects caused by walking the city streets.
"The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus, the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life."
--Charles Baudelaire